Not All State of the Union Guests Are Welcome

Will we be hearing about Yummy Eggplant Lasagna Rolls at the State of the Union tonight? A recipe by that name is what got Aliana Arzola-Piñero, a fourth grader from San Juan, her invitation to the speech; the rolls were served at the Kids’ State Dinner, one of Michelle Obama’s healthy-child projects. Sometimes the list of guests in the First Lady’s box offers a preview of themes, initiatives, and shout-outs in the speech, and sometimes you wonder if someone in a White House office just won a bet about the appeal of eggplant.

It takes nothing away from Aliana, or her undoubtedly yummy lasagna rolls, to say that the list of guests has become a bit too overdetermined to say something useful about politics. For one thing, there are more than two dozen invitees. Maybe Carlos Arredondo and Jeff Bauman, who survived the Boston Marathon bombing—Arredondo was the man in the cowboy hat—will make it into the peroration; maybe we’ll hear about how John Soranno, a founder of Punch Pizza, has a ten-dollar-an-hour, company-wide minimum wage. But, on the whole, as admirable as they are and as much as they’ve been through, the guests are less cameo appearances than background figures in a deleted scene, the kind that only aficionados go looking for. Amanda Shelley, who got health-care coverage just two days before she needed emergency surgery, will be with Michelle; it doesn’t look like anyone involved in building the HealthCare.gov Web site will be.

The most interesting guests tonight will be the uninvited ones—the spectres at the table. It won’t be surprising if the President invokes Pope Francis, or Malala Yousafzai, or Edith Windsor, who went to the Supreme Court to get her marriage to another woman recognized by the federal government, and won. But will he make use of the provocative potential in each of their stories, or those of his guests? Four Supreme Court Justices voted against Windsor; one of them, Samuel Alito, has a history of not containing himself at State of the Union speeches. It is easy for Obama to, say, simply celebrate Jason Collins, the N.B.A. player who came out last year and who will be sitting with the First Lady; it will be another thing if he connects Collins’s name to that of Vladimir Putin, and to what’s waiting for gay athletes at the Sochi Olympics.

And if Obama talks about Cory Remsburg—an Army Ranger whose path crossed the President’s three times, the third in the hospital where Remsburg was, partially paralyzed, after being hit by a roadside bomb in Kandahar on his tenth deployment—will he also mention the name of President Hamid Karzai, of Afghanistan? Karzai has been having one of those days when he talks about how the United States, whose soldiers have fought and died to keep him in power, is after him—responsible, he says, for terrorist attacks against his government. (Ambassador James Cunningham called this “a deeply conspiratorial view that’s divorced from reality,” according to the Post.) Obama probably won’t have a word for Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense. Gates has been complaining about Obama’s commitment to the Afghan war, though the critique is pretty diffuse—he doesn’t seem to have liked Obama’s fighting spirit. We’ll see how tired the President looks when he talks about our wars tonight.

And will any of the Democratic contenders in 2016 get mentions? Joe Biden will be sitting there; watch his expression if Hillary Clinton makes it into the speech.

A name many people will listen for is Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor whose leaks about the National Security Agency’s overreach have made for the most volatile political story of the year. Obama has offered policy proposals in response; it will be a disappointment if he doesn’t mention them tonight. He might do so without bringing up Snowden, whom he has dismissed even as he accepts the importance of the revelations. At the moment, it might be unimaginable for a First Lady (or Gentleman) to have Snowden as a guest. But maybe a future President will put his name in a State of the Union—without ambivalence or disdain.